No Regrets (23 page)

Everyone else gets the point soon enough, as the coaster roars right through the exit station! There’s fear now on the faces of the riders, but it’s also on the faces of the college kids operating the ride—coupled with a helpless look of bewilderment. The brakes have been rendered almost inoperable from the rain, and a hopeless feeling suddenly consumes everyone. We again begin climbing the hundred-foot peak listening to the clanking of the giant chain drive pulling us upward, closer and closer to the summit. Our situation seems grave. What horror awaits us after the first drop?

I think, Maybe it’s time to start praying…?

And I’m not alone. Now people are really getting scared. Everyone is aware of our predicament, especially since the skies have really opened. A driving rain beats against the coaster. This no longer seems like a benign thrill. I ask myself, Is this a dream? It can’t really be happening! Have I entered the Twilight Zone?!

We’re falling again now, faster than ever, careening through turns, seemingly out of control, no brakes, no hope of stopping, and moving at a speed far exceeding the safety limits of the ride. Seemingly in some sort of crazy death spiral. Some riders on the coaster are screaming their fuckin’ brains out, while others are completely silent, with a blank look of fear mixed with panic and confusion. We’re all wondering whether we’re going to jump the track and end up mangled somewhere far below.

Soon, though, by the grace of God, we’re approaching the final turn again, just before the track straightens out and funnels into the exit station. The brakes aren’t squeaking anymore—they’ve probably been literally sheared off by the friction produced by the runaway ride. The
attendants are standing there together, five or six of them, arguing about what to do. I twist in my seat and try to get their attention.

“Shut it down!”

“What?!”

“Turn off the fucking motor, you idiots!!”

Again we start ascending to the top of the giant tower to an almost certain horrific ending. Suddenly everything stops. No more clanking sound from the chain drive. No more screams from the riders. A weird calm overtakes everyone. Apparently the operators have finally done what they should have done in the first place: cut the power to the giant motor running the chain drive. The coaster stops dead in its tracks. We’re stuck—on the first giant hill. A little scary, but preferable to the alternative. The horror show is over! After a while security guards ascend the catwalk, accompanied by sighs of relief and cheers of happiness from all concerned.

Slowly and carefully, one at a time, the guards escort us down the narrow catwalk to safety. Don is holding his daughter, who is visibly shaken. She’s not the only one. I’ve never been on a runaway roller coaster before, and it occurs to me for a moment that it’s the perfect metaphor for the way I feel in general right now: like my life is completely out of control. As if being in KISS is a lot like riding a roller coaster that just won’t stop. And there is nothing I can do about it.

Is this a lesson from someone trying to reach me and make me realize my predicament? A messenger in the form of a giant machine? Maybe so, but I won’t realize it or act upon it until much later.

The pace never slowed. We released two more studio
albums in a span of seven months:
Rock and Roll Over
in November 1976, and
Love Gun
in June 1977. In less than three and a half years KISS had funneled an incredible amount of music into the marketplace: six studio albums and one double live record. We never stopped touring, either. Sometimes the road was a blast, sometimes it was a drag. And once in a while it was nearly fatal.

Just a few weeks after the release of
Rock and Roll Over
(on December 12, 1976, to be precise), at the start of a show at the Lakeland (Florida) Civic Center, I was electrocuted and nearly killed. Here’s how it happened:

We were supposed to enter the stage by walking down a set of stairs. Every entrance involving stairs was a challenge for us, given the platform shoes we wore. Usually we’d hold tightly to a railing to make sure we didn’t slip or fall. Well, on this particular night my guitar wasn’t appropriately grounded, so when I touched the metal railing on the staircase I got hit with a big dose of electricity. I didn’t even get to the stage before it happened. I was just about to start going down and I touched the railing at the top of the staircase and got thrown backward onto the platform above the amps. I don’t think the other guys in the band even realized what had happened—maybe they just thought I’d slipped or something. They continued to march toward the stage and began playing. Meanwhile, I was flat on my back, stunned nearly to the point of unconsciousness.

Some guys from our road crew quickly picked me up and carried me down the back staircase, while the band kept playing. I was out of it for a while. I had burns on my fingertips—that’s how much voltage there was. Eventually the guys realized I wasn’t coming out, and they stopped the show and came back behind the amps to check on me. I hadn’t even gone back to the dressing room yet—I was just sitting there, disoriented, trying to get my bearings. As my head cleared I could hear the audience chanting:

“We want Ace! We want Ace!”

That got my adrenaline going, and after about five more minutes or so I went back out and played the entire concert. I had a nasty headache and my fingers were a little numb, but what the hell? The show must go on, right? We all performed at less than peak physical condition at one time or another. There were a few occasions when I could hardly walk because of knee pain and one of the docs would come backstage and shoot me up with needles and I’d go out and play. Paul was sick plenty
of times and they’d shoot him up with something to get him through the show. When you’ve got twenty thousand seats sold, you do whatever you can to get out on the stage. That’s just the way it works.

If there was one good thing to come out of that night, it was the fact that it provided the impetus for one of my favorite KISS songs, and the first on which I had the balls to sing lead. The guys had urged me to write about my near-death experience, and while electricity runs through the song and did indeed provide the initial spark of inspiration, the end result is a tune that’s less about getting fried onstage than it is about getting laid afterward.

A good KISS song, in other words.

Shock me, make me feel better, oh yeah

Come on and shock me, put on your black leather

Baby, I’m down to the bare wire

Shock me, we can come together

Thanks to the return of Eddie Kramer, my favorite producer and engineer,
Rock and Roll Over
was a more enjoyable experience than
Destroyer
had been. It’s a good record, more true to the original KISS mission than
Destroyer
had been, and helped placate some of the fans who were angered by the studio gimmicks of Bob Ezrin on
Destroyer. Rock and Roll Over
was an unqualified success, shipping platinum and producing another hit single sung by Peter, “Hard Luck Woman,” as well as “Calling Dr. Love,” which would become something of a KISS classic.

Eddie wanted a return to the rawer sound of earlier KISS albums, so we recorded the album live at the old Nanuet Star Theatre in Rockland County, about twenty miles north of New York City, and then mixed it at the Record Plant. The acoustics at the Star were incredible, and Eddie had us use every inch of the place, setting up instruments in different places to get different types of sounds. At one point he even had Peter playing drums in the bathroom! There was also another really nice feature about recording in Nanuet. I had recently married Jeanette
and we’d settled in Tarrytown, New York, which was just across the Hudson River. All I had to do was roll out of bed and shoot west across the Tappan Zee Bridge and I was there in ten minutes.

I think my guitar playing on
Rock and Roll Over
is solid, and I know that I felt more connected to the album while we were recording. That’s probably due to Eddie as much as anything else. But the truth is that while I like the record a lot, it was the first KISS album on which I did not contribute a single composition. I didn’t feel good about that. I thought of myself as a writer as well as a guitar player, and I had no one but myself to blame. Yeah, it’s true that in any band with four strong personalities and big egos, there’s a certain amount of time spent marking your territory. Everybody wants to write and sing; everyone wants the spotlight. I was no different. But if you’re not bringing material to the table, you can’t really complain, can you?

So I sat down and wrote “Shock Me.” Everyone loved it and agreed that it belonged on the next album,
Love Gun
. My initial thought, as usual, was to turn it over to Gene or Paul and let them handle the vocals. To my surprise, they resisted.

“You should sing this one yourself,” Paul said. “It’s way overdue.” And that’s how I wound up flat on my back on the floor of a studio at the Record Plant, trying to relax, with the lights turned down low and Eddie Kramer at the board, encouraging me to sing from the gut.

Which is exactly what I did.

I like
Love Gun
a lot; I’m proud of the whole album. There are a few things on it, though, that really make me smile. Like some of my leads… and the vocal on “Shock Me.” It never actually occurred to me until that album that I was a viable singer. What I learned is that you don’t have to be a trained vocalist to be a rock singer, any more than you have to be a classically trained musician to play guitar. Just believe in what you’re doing and the audience will go along for the ride.

Looking back on it now, there a lot of things about the
KISS marketing machine that make me laugh, and a few that make me
cringe. Every time I thought we’d reached a new high (or low), the bar was moved ever so slightly. The cardboard “love gun” that was included in every copy of
Love Gun,
for example. To the relief of parents of teenagers all over the world, this gimmick was merely a toy gun, and not the giant dildo some may have expected. We also included a page of KISS tattoos that were actual duplicates of tattoos we had on our arms. That was a good one. Cheap and effective.

More expensive, and more ambitious by miles, was the first KISS comic book, produced by Marvel Comics in 1977. We got to meet the great Stan Lee, creator of Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk. I thought Stan was cool, but Gene was the real fanboy, trailing Stan around and asking him questions about everything he’d written over the last thirty years. Gene was and is a comic book fanatic. He told me once that when he first arrived in the United States from Israel, the first thing he learned to read was a comic book. I guess he never stopped, which at least partially explains how he came up with his character for KISS. I was a little bit of a fan, but I could take them or leave them. I was intrigued by the superhero aspect of comic books, but it was the artwork that really grabbed my attention.

Predictably, the KISS comic book wasn’t allowed to simply sneak into the marketplace. Like everything else we did, its birth was accompanied by a wild publicity stunt. We all gathered at the printing plant in Buffalo, New York, where the comic would be produced, and together we each donated a vial of blood, which we then poured into a vat of red ink, which was mixed in with the actual ink that would be used to print the comic books. I’m not sure exactly what this was supposed to signify, but as a marketing stunt it worked beautifully. Fans thought it was awesome, critics thought it was ridiculous, and conservative and religious groups were repulsed, claiming that the stunt provided further evidence that KISS was doing the devil’s work, and that possibly we were vampires!

To which we could only reply… “Ahhhh, bullshit.”

The marketing silliness reached a peak of sorts with
KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park,
a 1978 made-for-television movie with a plot so ridiculous that I start laughing just thinking about it. We played superhero versions of ourselves, locked in a battle with a demented scientist bent on taking over a popular amusement park by creating four androids that looked just like us.

How could anyone make this shit up?

It wasn’t the greatest movie, but that never bothered me because I wasn’t under the impression that anyone expected it to be anything other than a ridiculous farce—including the people who wrote, directed, and produced it. If you look at it now, the movie seems kind of campy and cool. The problem is, it wasn’t meant to be that way. I watch it now and get a kick out of it, but I know Gene is embarrassed about it. Then again, Gene takes everything so fucking seriously, which is ironic since he was the one who always claimed to be happy that KISS was selling out arenas and moving millions of records, without regard for artistic integrity. How the hell do you make a movie called
KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park
and expect people not to laugh? I also heard that when he saw
This Is Spinal Tap
he didn’t think it was very funny. To each his own. I personally thought it was hysterical.